The sign is seen at the front of the Review-Journal building on Wednesday Dec. 16, 2015 in Las Vegas. Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal Follow @bizutesfaye

Patrick Dumont, Las Vegas Sands Corp. senior vice president of finance and strategy, and his wife, Sivan Ochshorn, are seen attending the Zionist Organization of America Herzl-Brandeis Award dinner in 2009 in New York City. At the event, his father-in-law, Sheldon Adelson, received the Theodor Herzl Gold Medallion and his mother-in-law, Miriam, received the Louis D. Brandeis Award. (Zionist Organization of America)

Sheldon Adelson (Las Vegas Review-Journal File)

Las Vegas Sands Corp. CEO Sheldon Adelson is shown during an event at UNLV on Monday, May 5, 2014. David Becker/Las Vegas Review-Journal

Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., toured the Las Vegas home of Louise and Laurence Gaskins, a Vietnam veteran, with Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., earlier in June. They used the experience to discuss the need for the bill, the Veterans Homebuyer Accessibility Act of 2013, introduced by Langevin and co-sponsored by Titus. (Martin S. Fuentes/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

The sign is seen at the front of the Review-Journal building on Wednesday Dec. 16, 2015 in Las Vegas. Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal Follow @bizutesfaye

The sign is seen at the front of the Review-Journal building on Wednesday Dec. 16, 2015 in Las Vegas. Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal Follow @bizutesfaye

Patrick Dumont, who is listed on the website of Las Vegas Sands Corp. as the company’s senior vice president of finance and strategy, put together the deal at the behest of his father-in-law, the chairman and CEO of the casino operator.

Dumont, a 41-year-old from New York, in 2009 married Sivan Ochshorn, a daughter of Adelson’s wife, Dr. Miriam Adelson, from a prior marriage. Sivan Ochshorn Dumont runs the Israel Hayom, which is owned by the casino mogul.

“He (Dumont) handles all the investments for the family,” said a source close to the Adelsons who was not authorized to speak on behalf of the family.

Another source familiar with the deal said Sheldon Adelson, 15th on the Forbes 400 List of Billionaires with a net worth of $24.5 billion, funded the transaction. Dumont helped create News + Media Capital Group LLC, which acquired the Review-Journal and several smaller Nevada newspapers last week from New Media Investment Corp.

A source said Dumont also led Adelson’s previous attempt to acquire the Review-Journal from former owner Stephens Media LLC before the February sale to New Media Investment. He could not be reached for comment. Sivan Ochshorn Dumont, reached at the couple’s Las Vegas home, hung up before answering a reporter’s questions Wednesday.

Adelson, meanwhile, broke several days of silence on the newspaper purchase late Tuesday night, telling CNN media reporter Brian Stelter only that he has “no personal interest” in the RJ’s new owner.

Fortune magazine on Wednesday cited “multiple sources familiar with the situation” in reporting Adelson was the newspaper’s “primary buyer.”

Michael Reed, CEO of New Media Investment Corp., did not respond to repeated calls for comment.

That includes the Society of Professional Journalists — a 7,500-member advocacy group that promotes First Amendment and media ethics causes — and the American Society of News Editors, which issued a statement Wednesday urging the new owners to “stop hiding and reveal themselves.”

In an interview off the floor, Titus said that she decided to speak on the House floor after hearing from constituents in Las Vegas over the weekend and seeing employees of the Review-Journal raise their own questions.

“A lot of people are being very brave working for the RJ and calling for this. And, this is a bigger issue because it applies to the press anywhere. So, I decided I’m going to speak on the floor,” she said.

The Review-Journal was purchased last week by News + Media Capital Group LLC — a newly formed, Delaware-domiciled company backed by “undisclosed financial backers with expertise in the media industry.”

News + Media paid $140 million for the newspaper and its sister publications, around $38 million more than New Media Investment Group paid in March for all of Stephens Media LLC, a national chain of eight daily newspapers that included the Review-Journal. As a Delaware limited liability corporation, News + Media is not required to list its owners in any public document.

The inflated purchase price has fueled speculation and denials surrounding the newspaper’s new owners, much of which has centered on Adelson, a Republican Party mega-donor, pledging $100 million in donations to GOP candidates in the 2012 election cycle. He is also actively involved in Israeli politics.

The Review-Journal reported Tuesday that Adelson, working through intermediaries, made a bid for the newspaper earlier this year, when GateHouse Media bought it along with most other assets of Stephens Media LLC.

Family ties

Adelson was born in 1933 and has often described a childhood lived in abject poverty in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. As a teenager he began his business career operating downtown Boston newsstand and later investing in candy machines, becoming an SEC-registered investment adviser, working in real estate and becoming a venture capitalist and owner of a travel agency.

Adelson’s association with Las Vegas began when he started the immensely successful Comdex computer and technology trade show in 1979 and launched his convention-center empire with his 1989 purchase of the Sands hotel and redevelopment of the site into the Sands Expo and Convention Center. He built the 4,049-room Venetian in 1999 and the adjacent 3,068-room Palazzo in 2007. Properties in Macau in 2004 and Singapore in 2006 followed.

At 82, the Summerlin resident has built a net worth of $24.5 billion, according to Forbes, and a business empire that touches diverse industries including hospitality, media and even medicine. He involves his wife of 24 years and their blended family in his enterprises and causes.

His wife, Israel-born medical doctor Miriam Ochshorn Adelson, 70, helps run the Adelson Family Foundation, which says it supports causes such as Holocaust and anti-Semitism awareness; advocacy and defense of Israel; Jewish and Zionist identity and education; and Israel studies on college campuses.

Miriam Adelson is also, like her husband, a Republican campaign mega-donor. She made her first major debut on the campaign-finance stage in early 2012, when she matched her husband’s largesse with a $5 million primary campaign contribution to Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.

“Sheldon and I share the same vision and beliefs, although we come from two different backgrounds,” she told Fortune magazine at the time. “We are in full agreement on the causes we support, whether they are helpless people, drug addicts or young people looking for roots in Israel. We don’t have arguments, or long discussions; it’s quite a fast discussion bearing in mind our common values.”

Fortune added that it “seems clear” that Miriam Adelson “helped bring her husband to the Israeli cause.”

The Adelsons met on a blind date in 1988, according to a 2014 profile in Hadassah magazine. Sheldon Adelson proposed within 100 days, the story said, and the couple married in 1991.

The union conjoined a large family that is also active in the couple’s business interests and political causes.

Adelson’s daughter, Shelley Faye Adelson, married Richard Heller, a businessman who landed a job as president of Sands Expo & Convention Center. The daughter and son-in-law divorced, but Heller stayed with the convention center for more than 15 years, from at least 1989 until the mid-2000s. It’s unclear where Heller works now.

The children have donated heavily to political candidates their parents support.

Israel Hayom notes on its website that it sets “clear and precise standards” for media coverage, including rigid fact-checking, a public editor who serves as an ombudsman with readers and their concerns, and openness to reader criticism. The paper’s online statement said it also “will not give a hand to ‘spin.'”

Other interests that have drawn multiple family members include Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Holocaust memorial to which Miriam and Sheldon Adelson donated $25 million in 2006; the Adelson Educational Campus in Summerlin, a K-12 school of which Sivan Dumont is a trustee; the pro-Israel Zionist Association of America; and Taglit-Birthright Israel, a nonprofit that sponsors free “heritage trips” to Israel for Jewish young adults. The Adelson family had contributed more than $250 million to the group as of February, according to the Algemeiner, a New York newspaper that covers Jewish and Israeli news.

Adelson also has two sons from his first marriage. One son, Mitchell, died of a drug overdose in 2005; son Gary is not involved with the family, according to multiple media reports.

Legal wrangling

Adelson is widely known as both a tough and litigious businessman who often faces off against both business associates and journalists in court, using his vast fortune to fuel protracted legal battles.

He sued the London’s Daily Mail for defamation, with the case settled in 2008. In 2013, he filed a defamation lawsuit against a Wall Street Journal reporter looking into his Macau casino operations.

And Adelson has twice filed lawsuits over comments about him that appeared in Las Vegas-based publications. Both of those lawsuits were eventually dismissed, but not before one action bankrupted RJ columnist John L. Smith, who had written about him in a book about casino moguls.

Adelson is also battling two long-pending lawsuits filed by former business associates. A wrongful termination case brought by Steven Jacobs, the former CEO of the company’s Sands China subsidiary, is scheduled to go to trial in June in Clark County District Court.

The case, filed in 2010, centers on claims that he was fired for “blowing the whistle on improprieties and placing the interests of shareholders above those of Adelson.”

In June, the British newspaper The Guardian and nonprofit watchdog group Campaign for Accountability asked Clark County District Court Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez to unseal records in the case that could reveal business ties between Las Vegas Sands and high-ranking members of Chinese organized-crime groups called triads.

The Campaign for Accountability said it wanted to know if Adelson “has used money acquired through criminal activity in Macau casinos to make campaign contributions to candidates for public office.”

Adelson has responded that he had “at least 34 good reasons” to fire Jacobs and has forced at least two political groups that have tried to use Jacobs’ allegations against him to retract statements and apologize.

Meanwhile, in January the Nevada Supreme Court will hear the appeal of the $101.5 million verdict in the second Richard Suen trial.

Suen, a Hong Kong businessman, sued Adelson and the company nearly a decade ago, claiming he helped the casino operator secure a Macau gaming license in the early 2000s. However, Suen claimed the company refused to pay him for his services.

In 2008, a Clark County District Court jury awarded Suen $43.8 million plus interest and fees, which grew the judgement to $58 million. The Nevada Supreme Court overturned the verdict in 2010 because of the amount of hearsay evidence Suen’s attorneys put into the record.

A second trial in 2013 resulted in a second win for Suen, with the jury awarding $70 million, plus another $31.6 million in interest. Since 2013, the verdict has been growing by $8,400 a day until the judgment is paid or overturned on appeal.

Contact James DeHaven at jdehaven@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3839. Find him on Twitter: @JamesDeHaven

Adelson Family Statement

The Adelson family has called Las Vegas home for nearly 25 years. Through our business interests here we’ve helped employ tens of thousands of people and have been honored to provide support to many of this community’s important charitable and civic organizations and causes.

Today, we are proud to announce that the Adelson family has purchased the Las Vegas Review-Journal through a wholly-owned fund, as both a financial investment as well as an investment in the future of the Las Vegas community.

We understand the desire of the hard-working staff at the R-J and others in the community to know the identity of the papers new owners, and it was always our intention to publicly announce our ownership of the R-J.

This week, with each of the Republican candidates for president and the national media descending on Las Vegas for the year’s final debate, we did not want an announcement to distract from the important role Nevada continues to play in the 2016 presidential election.

Our motivation for purchasing the R-J is simple. We believe in this community and want to help make Las Vegas an even greater place to live. We believe deeply that a strong and effective daily newspaper plays a critical role in keeping our state apprised of the important news and issues we face on a daily basis.

The management team from New Media, which is currently running the R-J, will continue to oversee the operations of the publication. The family wants a journalism product that is second-to-none and will continue to invest in the paper to achieve this goal.

On behalf of our family, we wish the entire Las Vegas Valley a safe and healthy holiday season and our best wishes for 2016.

Operators of the Pinball Hall of Fame have been approved to build a new, larger arcade near the south edge of the Strip on Las Vegas Boulevard near Russel Road. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal) @KMCannonPhoto

National Hardware Show underway Las Vegas

The National Hardware Show kicked off Tuesday at the Las Vegas Convention Center (Mat Luschek / Review-Journal)

Caesars for sale?

Caesars Entertainment Corp. has been swept up in takeover speculation since the company’s share price tumbled last year amid disappointing earnings and concerns over a recession. Amid the decline, hedge funds scooped up shares. Billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn began buying shares of Caesars as early as January. Icahn acquired nearly 18 percent by mid-March. In February Icahn called on the Caesars board to study a sale as a way to boost shareholder value.

Las Vegas home prices

Las Vegas home prices grew fastest among major markets in February for the ninth straight month. But amid affordability concerns, the growth rate has slowed down. Southern Nevada prices in February were up 9.7% from a year earlier, according to the latest S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller index. The last time Las Vegas' price growth fell below 10% was in September 2017, S&P Dow Jones Indices reported.

Free Parking Coming To Wynn

Free parking will come to the Wynn and Encore resorts on May 1, 2019. (Mat Luschek / Review-Journal)

Founding Venetian employees talk about 20 years at the Strip resort

The Venetian, which opened May 3, 1999, is celebrating 20 years on the Las Vegas Strip. Seven original employees talk about opening the luxury resort and working there for two decades. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal) @KMCannonPhoto

Circa aiming for December 2020 opening

The 1.25-million-square-foot property will have 44-stories and 777-rooms. It will also have a separate nine-story, 1,201-space parking garage.

Boxabl official explains the building concept

Boxabl business development manager Galiano Tiramani shows off a room built by his company. (Blake Apgar/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

TI/Mirage Tram reopens

The tram that shuttles guests between TI and Mirage reopened this week after being closed for much of 2018.

Las Vegas Convention Center expansion taking shape

Renderings and actual footage show how the Las Vegas Convention Center is evolving.

Japan’s NHK Science & Technology Research Laboratories booth featured a 1mm thick 8K TV system used in conjunction with a 22.2 channel digital sound system at the National Association of Broadcasters Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal) @KMCannonPhoto

Business reporter Rick Velotta gives an update on the adjudicatory hearing on the suitability of Wynn Resorts to retain its gaming license in Massachusetts.

Henderson app developer part of Startup in Residence

Henderson based developers of the app On Point Barricade are taking part in Startup in Residence, a North America program dedicated to pairing tech companies with governments. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal) @KMCannonPhoto

Sam's Town employees and customers talk of their love for the iconic casino

Longtime Sam's Town employees and customers love each other and love their casino. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal) @KMCannonPhoto

Las Vegas apartments rents

Las Vegas’ apartment market has accelerated in recent years. Developers are packing the suburbs with projects, landlords are on a buying spree, and tenants have filled buildings.

William Boyd talks about the birth of Sam's Town

On the eve of the 40th anniversary of Sam's Town, William Boyd, executive chairman of Boyd Gaming and son of hotel namesake Sam Boyd, talks about how the casino became one of the first local properties in Las Vegas. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal) @KMCannonPhoto

There are no data showing a relationship between Strip resort and parking fees and the number of out-of-state visitors to Las Vegas. But there are data showing a relationship between Strip parking fees and the number of local visitors to the the Strip. ‘’As a local, I find myself picking hotels I visit for dinner or entertainment, based on whether they charge for parking or not,”’ said David Perisset, the owner of Exotics Racing. ‘’It is not a matter of money, more of principle.’’
A 2018 survey by the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance found 36.9 percent of Clark County residents reported avoiding parking at Strip casinos that charge for parking. 29.1 percent reported avoiding using any services from a Strip casino that charges for parking.

MGM's sports betting deals

MGM Resorts International signed a sports betting sponsorship agreement with the NBA in July It was the first professional sports league to have official ties with a legal sports betting house. The deal came just two months after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a law prohibiting sports betting in most states. In October, MGM became the first gaming company to sign a sports betting partnership with the NHL. In November, MGM became the first gaming company to sign a sports betting partnership with the MLB. Financial terms of Tuesday’s deal and earlier partnerships have not been announced.

Faraday puts Las Vegas land on the market

Nearly two years after Faraday Future bailed on its North Las Vegas auto factory, the company has put its land up for sale. (Michael Quine/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority announced the recommendation for an underground people mover for the convention center. The system would have the potential to expand and connect Downtown and the resort corridor all the way to McCarran. (Michael Quine/ Las Vegas Review-Journal)